Traditionally, refugee resettlement is not common in rural areas. However, more recently, rural communities are increasingly receiving refugees and may offer better prospects for refugees to find new homes. This qualitative article describes and explores resettlement in rural Canada. To do so, we discuss precarity in refugee camps, the permanency of rural resettlement, and highlight how resettling refugees in rural Canada can be beneficial for both refugees and the communities that receive them. This article is written using a first-person narrative approach to allow Vestine, the refugee and co-researcher, to speak for herself. The article emphasizes the opportunities of rural resettlement, which include supporting rural economies, creating a sense of belonging, and enriching community diversity, while also identifying the key challenges encountered. We suggest that rural communities can play a critical role in creating a sense of place and space for refugee families.
Knowledge through experience, the third source of human rights knowledge, can help raise authentic awareness by listening to the voices of the people being challenged with human rights violations. Cura personalis, a Jesuit concept of individualized care and concern, can be used to amplify experiential knowledge. Cura personalis consists of four Core Cura Personalis Characteristics, which include relationships, programs, feedback, and policies. A case study from Stadnyk (2021), which is titled Individualized care and concern for the distant neighbour: A case-study on the organizational hierarchy that fosters a culture of cura personalis in Jesuit Refugee Service schools in Lebanon, helps to show how the Jesuit Refugee Service in Lebanon utilizes cura personalis in order to ensure their aid provides a service while strengthening the voice of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Cura personalis can help move humanitarian aid towards restoring and enhancing human rights in a manner that not only heals, but does so by hearing and paying attention to their personal needs.
How and why do we remember historical violence and injustice? Is it to learn from the past and to prevent it from happening in the future or do they then become melancholic memories that stay in our bodies/skin only to be generationally passed on? According to “Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma” (Simon et al., 2000) the re-remembrance of who and what came before us needs provides a pedagogical framework. My goal in this work is to explore how one’s return to re-remembering can rupture the silences of public/colonial sites of historical violence and create spaces for collective connection and care. I will employ mixed methodology to discuss how pedagogical frameworks and practices of remembrance can be used to help facilitate space for hope and healing; analyzing public historical memories of the Vietnam War represented by photographs and news media, I will also share personal stories as a non-binary, first generation Vietnamese educator as a basis for my analysis.
One-third of U.S. children ages 0-5 are dual language learners (DLLs) and at present, Spanish is the most common non-English language spoken at home in the U.S. During the COVID-19 pandemic, pre-existing disparities such as the digital divide were exacerbated. Such disparities heavily impacted DLLs and in response, two Chicana librarians developed Cuentitos. Cuentitos is a Spanish-English bilingual storytime program designed to promote early bilingual literacy, cultural heritage, and social-emotional learning. Implemented in two local early education centers, Cuentitos integrates interactive storytelling, music, and movement to foster bilingualism as an asset. Grounded in intersectionality and core library values of access, equity, and representation, the program celebrates and affirms DLL identities. Cuentitos exemplifies a transformative model for library-based interventions supporting children and families. This paper explores the program’s development, implementation, and impact, positioning Cuentitos as a replicable framework for inclusive early literacy education.
This article analyzes an unacknowledged treasure trove of refugee literature that contests media stereotypes of anonymous, needy people fleeing their homes and creating problems wherever they go. It is part of the author’s doctoral dissertation on the role of Syrian refugees’ literature in creating a better understanding of the lives of people in unfamiliar places and terrifying phases of their lives. Based on her reading of 15 Syrian refugee literary works and her interviews with 10 Syrian writers, in this article, she presents an analysis of the concept of home for refugees. First, she compares definitions of diasporic peoples, exiles, migrants, and refugees. Second, she reviews theories on home. Third, she analyzes how Syrian writers who narrate refugee experiences refer to home in their stories. She argues that for refugees, all definitions of home disappear instantly. Interweaving memory and creativity, refugees use their past to rebuild the foundations of the present and re-create home.
This article brings to light the often-overlooked educational disruptions of transnational students—those who move from schools in the United States to schools in Mexico. To do so, I adopt an innovative technique developed by Theodore Sizer known as the “fiction/non-fiction” approach. This method allows researchers to portray school dynamics through composite characters who are fictional, yet whose experiences and words are grounded in real events. In this article, I created a 12-year-old transnational student named Lulu. Based on notes of several interviews with Lulu, I imagined what she might want to say to her teachers, upon her arrival in a middle high school in Morelos, Mexico. The article also offers several hypotheses about what transnational students might wish to express to their teachers in U.S. schools.
Introduction to the Summer 2025 Issue of Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry (Volume 16, Number 3) entitled "The Unheard Voices, the Unheard Struggle: Una fuerza poderosa que lucha por expresarse" welcoming Guest Editors Noni Mendoza Reis, Rosalina Quintanar-Sarellana, Enid Lee and Lillie Ann Reynaga (Assistant Editor). This Special Issue presents stories through the voices of the Mexican/Latino community that explore central issues in effectively educating Chicano/Latino students in the USA.
In this paper, we turn to poetic (re)storying as a liberatory praxis and transgressive methodology in research with forcibly displaced people. Theoretically, the paper draws on endarkened feminist epistemology and poetic storying and (re)storying to illuminate how refugee women contest and defy gendered, racialized, colonial, and missionary refugee resettlement and education. In particular, the paper turns to poetic inquiry to offer new ways to examine refugees’ narratives and forms of livingness outside frameworks of victimhood, struggle, and pain. Through poetic (re)storying, the paper demonstrates how refugee experiences can be articulated and made legible outside normative research conventions.
Review of Cyril Dabydeen's 2024 publication Forgotten Exiles (Mosiac Press) by Anti-Racism educator Towani Duchsche, PhD. In Forgotten Exiles Dabydeen describes his experiences as a Guyanese immigrant adjusting to a new life in Canada.
My Wonderful Uncle Ronnie is one of a collection of essays written by a 5th grade student. The following essay is a poignant example of what emerges when students are given the freedom to write from the heart. When writing instruction takes place within a space for emotional truth and personal storytelling, something extraordinary happens. This narrative offers a window into grief, memory and love.
“Cuentos de mi niñez/Tales from My Childhood” is a short film by Francisca Duran a Chilean-Canadian experimental media artist who creates films, video installations, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works about history, memory, power and violence. She currently also works as sessional faculty at York University and conducts plant-based-processing and phytography workshops internationally. The film narrates, from the perspective of a young child, the events that happened in Chile on September 11, 1973, when, Salvador Allende, then president of Chile was overthrown by a military coup and was replaced by the army general Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s violent, authoritarian military rule, resulted in thousands of deaths and systematic torture of his perceived opponents. Duran recounts the historical record with pictures of the childhood she had and lost, and her refugee flight with her family, to the safety of faraway Canada.
Introduction to the Special Issue of Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry Volume 16, Number 3 (Winter 2025) entitled "The Unheard Voices, the Unheard Struggle: Una fuerza poderosa que lucha por expresarse” with Invited Guest Editors Noni Mendoza Reis, Rosalinda Quintanar-Sarellana, Enid Lee and Lillie Ann Reynaga.
A compelling family narrative that traces the remarkable journey of a Honduran family to the United States. Reina Ferrufino, a second-year doctoral student at the University of Nevada, and a dedicated student advocate administrator in higher education, embarks on telling this narrative with a profound purpose. Her goal is to document the oral stories of her family’s journey and preserve them in written form in order to inspire others to see how through storytelling, we can pay homage to the tradition of knowledge-sharing and ancestral legacies. Through the family’s story, Reina celebrates the resilience that guided her family in their pursuit of dreams. The essay also highlights the author’s actions taken to support undocumented students and challenge institutional policies in order to promote meaningful equity, diversity and inclusion.
As of May 2024, approximately 120 million people have been displaced due to war, violence, or human rights abuses (UNHCR, 2024). Refugees seeking asylum in Canada may be incarcerated in immigration detention centres. This autoethnography explores the enduring scars of childhood detention in my life, and trace the unreconciled oscillating tensions between belonging and exclusion. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s (1994) concepts of liminality and in-betweenness, I demonstrate how the overall experience of detention is situated along what I describe as the detention continuum – pre-detention, detention, and post-release/alternatives to detention – and consider how detention intensifies a lasting state of in-betweenness, where (formerly) detained refugee claimants continuously grapple with a shifting sense of self. As importantly, I map my experience of childhood detention on the detention continuum to provide insight of how the ambiguous nature of detention is translated in real lives.
Biographies of contributors to CPI Special Edition: "Voices of the Forcibly Displaced: Transition, Resettlement and Education" (Volume 17, No. 1) with Guest Editors Marcela S. Duran, Jan Stewart, Donald A. Dippo, Mohamed Duale and Cecille DePass.
Following the tradition of storytelling or Testimonio, the researcher shares the development of a process that resulted in the development and implementation of the Social Justice Framework for Action (SJFA). Written in a conversational manner, the article is a survival story of a Latina educator. She was assigned to improve educational systems that perpetuated inequalities and inequities for minoritized students. In responding, the researcher designed an approach to use with teacher teams to confront the persistent gaps in student performance. The approach embodied one of her core beliefs that educators are the most critical resource in a site, district, or county. Therefore, for any improvement effort to succeed, it is critical to function as a team. In this Testimonio, the researcher’s values are braided into this model through research, application, and refinement. The researcher’s own Latinx values and unwavering belief in students and their promise of learning became the focus when facing inequity and resistance. Nevertheless, the researcher found that implementing this model could become a breakthrough in collective practices, empowering other educators, and positively influencing student outcomes.
In February 2022, Russia launched a war on Ukraine, which has led to the greatest refugee movement and displacement of the Ukrainian people, since World War II. Nearly a third of Ukrainians were forced out of their homes. They were either internally displaced, or sought asylum in another country (UNHCR, 2022). An additional 900,000 people have left Russia, fleeing forced military conscription, political persecution, a repressive regime and protesting the war in Ukraine. Against this backdrop of conflict, an online community school, “Nomadic Tardigrade” has been founded to continue the education of children participating in concurrent displacements, to provide them with a sense of normality, and to offer opportunities for meaningful social interactions, during such difficult times. Based on the analysis of interviews, lessons, and artworks, I examine an art laboratory entitled “Home, where I” that was taught in this school to expand the notion of “homemaking” (Brun & Fabos, 2015), among displaced children existing in continuous liminality.
This review portrays a Rohingya woman’s reflection on the documentary film, “I am Rohingya: A Genocide in Four Acts.” This documentary has four acts: (i) the golden country, (ii) a clean nation, (iii) the long journey, and (iv) a new beginning. The film follows the production of a play about the genocide, written, directed and produced by a survivor of the genocide and performed by Rohingya youth whose families settled in Canada as refugees in the last decade. In addition, each act provides detailed information on the situation of the Rohingyas under Myanmar’s state-sponsored genocide and highlights that immediate actions are required from the international community. Evidence from the documentary confirms how the Buddhist majority from Myanmar and the government portray the Rohingyas as major threats to the country. This review describes how the incidents portrayed in the documentary trigger memories of the personal experiences of the author, who is also a Rohingya and one of the victims of the genocide.
Although leadership programs are built around state-adopted professional standards, preparation for the hiring process is often overlooked. This study explores educational administration students’ perceptions of a mock interview assessment, implemented as an experiential learning activity within a school personnel course. It investigates how mock interviews support aspiring school leaders in developing key skills such as interview preparedness, self-marketing, and professional communication. A survey of 31 students revealed common preparation strategies, strengths in experience and communication, and challenges in confidence and self-promotion. Findings suggest that the mock interview process offers authentic learning opportunities aligned with experiential learning theory and may strengthen administrator preparation programs.
This essay explores the use of participatory action research (PAR) as a pedagogical framework for transformative inquiry and ethical engagement with refugees in higher education. The pedagogical practice of learning from refugee testimonies has been criticized for reinforcing power imbalances and potentially causing harm to participants (e.g., Taylor et al., 2014; Gabriel, 2008; Kahn & Fabos, 2017). We reflect on the practice of autoethnographic reflexive interviewing (Vang et al., 2023) in the context of two classroom-based and refugee-engaged PAR studies, which is a decolonial methodology (Smith, 2012) that involves refugee community partners collaborating in the development of the research questions that they themselves answer through interviews and journal writing. We argue that PAR provides a research and pedagogical framework that emphasizes equitable collaboration and co-construction of knowledge between researchers and community partners, ensuring that refugee experiences, knowledge, and testimonies are produced for the goal of supporting action for community well-being and justice.
